Hello,

I've just started a new contract working on an XP rollout for a client. They
have about 100 PC's to upgrade from Win98 to XP Pro and told me they had
developed a standard image and just needed assistance in planning the
deployment and the physical rollout itself.

It now transpires that they have about 20 different models of unbadged
desktops and half a dozen different laptops. They were planning to lay the
same ghost image on each machine and then add extra drivers, copy the hal.dll
etc to get them to work.

Now, I've been involved in about a dozen large corporate rollouts and have
never come across this type of approach. I usually deploy a seperate image
for each model of hardware, and in a medium/large business environment they
tend to buy desktops in bulk (100's to 1000's at a time). This makes an OS
upgrade easier as there is a common platform.

What is going to be the most stable way to deploy a build in this case?

My initial feeling is that there isn't going to be one image as the client
thinks, but dozens - it's going to be down dictated by common motherboard
chipset and CPU etc.

I have a feeling they are up against it here, however it means that my
contract may run longer than I thought.

Any thought or ideas please.

PS - the client is a registered charity, and the option of a complete
hardware refresh is not an option.

Thanks,

Andy